Court Watch

Spokespersons for the SAFE Campaign, a coalition of groups and individuals opposing the current death penalty, announced the filing of 800,000 petition signatures Thursday morning at four simultaneous news conferences in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento and San Diego.

The final number of signatures goes far and above the 504,000 required to qualify the measure for the November 2012 ballot.  If passed, the measure would replace the death penalty with a punishment of life in prison with no chance of parole.

It is a trial that, in strange ways, still haunts me.  Bennie Moses sentenced to 830 years for the crime of the repeated rape of his daughter over a period of years.

There were enough reasons to believe he did it – there was DNA evidence of his daughter and his own semen found inside the fly of his shorts, there was her testimony, and then there was his own confession.

A Yolo County Jury found Steve Sargent not guilty of gross vehicular manslaughter for his role in a fatal accident that killed his passenger.  The jury would deadlock on a lesser included charge of vehicular manslaughter, 8-4 in favor of acquittal, and 7-5 also for acquittal on a charge of failure to stop.

Michael Morton was released from prison in October 2011 after spending nearly 25 years in prison for the murder of his wife.

A frequent criticism of the current state of California gang laws is that they permit prosecutors to enter in damaging and prejudicial evidence that generally would not be admissible, under California’s Evidence Code section 352.

That is the critical provision that allows the court, at its discretion, to “exclude evidence if its probative value is substantially outweighed by the probability that its admission will… substantial danger of undue prejudice…”

On Tuesday, Judge Dan Maguire sent out a press release announcing that he had received the endorsement of California’s leading crime victims’ group, the Crime Victims Action Alliance (CVAA). Crime Victims Action Alliance was formed in 1992 originally as the Doris Tate Crime Victims Bureau, named in honor of the mother of Sharon Tate, one of the pioneers of the crime victims’ movement.

“I’m honored to have the endorsement of the Crime Victims Action Alliance,” said Judge Maguire. “This organization keeps a watchful eye over the justice system to ensure that crime victims are respected and protected from additional harm. I am humbled that they trust me to continue on with the work I am doing.”

It is a brilliant and powerful montage, one in which a female voice sings in the background, “I am falling half an acre.”  The images depict a string of events in which people uncharacteristically go out of their way to do the right thing for their fellow human kind.

When KCRA 3 in Sacramento requested the dash cam video of the pursuit that ended up with Deputy Sheriff Tony Diaz being shot, and aired it on Thursday evening, it caught many off guard.

The video was a sensitive matter to the family.  When it was initially shown in court, relatives of Tony Diaz responded in loud emotional outbursts that required the court to recess and prompted the defense to ask for a mistrial.  While Judge Paul Richardson refused to declare a mistrial, he did admonish the family to control themselves.

When five defendants – four of them juveniles under the age of 16 were arrested in January of 2011 for assault and robbery, the Yolo County District Attorney’s office refused to drop the gang charges.  Because the gang charges remained in place, the DA’s office was able to continue their direct filing of the juveniles.

Direct filing is when the prosecutor is allowed to try a juvenile as an adult, and Proposition 21, passed in 2000, increased  the ability to do that.

Eventually, the case that could have settled on the base offenses went to trial and the case blew up in the face of prosecutors as the defense was able to question the field show-up technique of witness identification.  Moreover, the gang charges – thin to begin with – did not hold up.

Cash for Convictions Motivation Underlies Clearly Insurance-Driven Criminal Investigation

Linda Vela, 58, sits at the table at Denny’s in West Sacramento, her hands badly shaking. Her husband has to spread and cut the butter on her pancakes, but otherwise she is able largely to eat and drink normally, if she is careful with her left hand (she’s right handed).

It has been just four days since a Yolo County Jury found her guilty of twelve felonies – seven counts of Worker’s Compensation Insurance Fraud, three counts of Presenting False Statement Concerning Payment From An Insurance Policy, and two counts of Attempted Perjury, in connection with disability claims made between March of 2005 and February of 2007, following a trial that lasted approximately nine days.

I made a conscious decision to go to the Yolo County Courthouse yesterday morning, but not to attend the Topete sentencing.  I decided that I believe the process illegitimate and I did not want to legitimate the process with my presence.

There are a lot of things that need to be said and I will undoubtedly forget some of them.

One of our chief complaints about the operation of governments is that confidentiality laws that are supposed to protect minors from undue intrusions and public exposure are transformed into shields for public agencies to protect them from scrutiny regarding misconduct.

Acting on that rationale, the Los Angeles Times reports, “Los Angeles County Juvenile Court will be opened to media coverage regularly, with certain exceptions intended to protect the interests of children, under an order issued Tuesday by the court’s presiding judge.”

It is early but if Deputy DA Clinton Parish thought that Judge Dan Maguire was vulnerable, he may be sorely mistaken.  The judge has surged out to a tremendous monetary advantage – holding a nearly 5 to 1 advantage in contributions, an advantage that narrows only slightly on a percentage basis by the fact that both men have dumped their own money into the race as well.

For the first six months of the campaign from July 1 to December 31, Judge Maguire raised 24,850 dollars and put in 16,000 dollars of his own money for a campaign war chest of over 40,000 dollars.

Everyone recognizes that the current sentencing system is broken, and yet in an election year, two needed reform measures died in the supposedly liberal Assembly.